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To date, 70 children have contracted hyperinflammation as a result of a Covid-19 infection in Sweden.
– These are seriously ill children, all must receive specialized hospital care and between 15 and 20 children have needed intensive care, but no child has died in Sweden, says Petter Brodin, a pediatrician at Karolinska University Hospital and an immunologist at the Karolinska Institutet.
Abdominal pain
The first symptoms are usually abdominal pain, nausea, and high fever, and some children are confused and slow-thinking. Another group has rashes and red eyes. Some suffer from shock conditions due to severely impaired heart function and declining blood pressure, and these children need intensive care.
Typically, the inflammatory condition occurs one to two months after the COVID-19 infection, which itself may have been so mild that the children hardly noticed it. In several cases, only one parent has had symptoms and then the children get sick a month or two later.
Survey
Petter Brodin has now carried out, together with Italian researchers, the first survey on how the immune system behaves in children suffering from this serious inflammatory disease after covid-19 and has published its results in Cell.
They compared blood samples from children who suffered from another similar disease called Kawasaki disease, as well as from adults who suffered from severe inflammation during the ongoing COVID-19.
– We can see that these are three completely different types of inflammation. This, MIS-C, which affects children, is an entirely new inflammatory condition, says Petter Brodin.
No risk factors
Today, children are treated with very high doses of cortisone and biologic medications that suppress specific parts of the immune system, and children seem to respond very well to this treatment. Now they want to go further and find out why a small group of children get so sick after Covid-19. So far there are no known risk factors.
– What we know now is that most children are completely healthy before they get sick, says Petter Brodin.
The disease is called MIS-C, which is an abbreviation for: multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children associated with COVID-19 (MIS-C).
